Food for Education (F4E) have built the largest kitchen in Africa, feeding over 600,000 school children every day. They came to us with a broken WordPress website that needed a lot of work on a quick turnaround… Challenge accepted!

*Spoiler alert… Following the completion of this very successful website rescue mission, Food for Education asked us to design and build them a new website, which is now live! Read on to discover what this hackathon entailed, or read the case study about the brand new website here.

There was no shortage of problem solving and troubleshooting with this hackathon, all needing to be completed within a short amount of time – just two days!

A hackathon for fast WordPress fixes

F4E knew they wanted a new website from us, but they needed some pressing fixes to their old one first. We proposed the idea of a hackathon to them: we would carry out an array of fixes on their site and make as many design improvements as we could within two days. WordPress website owners can benefit from a hackathon of this kind when they’re experiencing the following kinds of problems:

• The live website seems to be full of problems, but the brand still requires a positive web presence until a new website is built.
• The website’s design needs to be improved. Depending on the theme and framework, changes could be possible to achieve in a short space of time – particularly beneficial ahead of a major upcoming event or news story.
• There are concerns about the security of the existing website and need urgent support.

Problems with F4E’s old WordPress site

The F4E site was suffering from a number of common problems:

• It had lots of plug-ins installed, many of which were not up-to-date, some of which were conflicting with others and some which posed security risks to the site.
• It relied on a framework called WP Bakery which had been modified by a previous developer and as a result had not been kept up-to-date.
• The site’s hosting was insecure and was running on an outdated version of PHP – a huge security risk.
• The website’s front-end and CMS editor took a very long time to load.
• The visual appearance was dated and uninspiring.

We don’t use page builder interfaces in our own website builds; we specialise in creating custom WordPress themes as they are faster to load, more intuitive to edit, more secure and easier to modify. With that said, when a client comes to us with a website that relies on a page builder framework like WP Bakery, we know just what to do…

Our solution

We first made a clone of the website and installed it onto our own secure testing server. We then removed all of the unnecessary and conflicting plugins after completing a detailed security audit. We discovered and removed some malware at the same time. We then updated PHP to the latest version, and rolled WP Bakery back to how it should have been out of the box, which allowed us to update that to the latest version too. Completing all of this enabled us to start working with WP Bakery’s array of features, modernising the look of the site within the parameters of the framework. Like all page builders, WP-Bakery doesn’t give infinite control over design but we were still able to make some drastic improvements.

We offered to host and maintain the repaired website for F4E pro bono until the new website was ready. This two day hackathon bought F4E a few months of invaluable time. Since then, we’ve completed the new website which is now live, read about it here.

As a business, we’re always thinking about how we can be better. Since the beginning we’ve been ethically motivated, whether that’s reducing our carbon footprint or helping brands who are on a mission to do good – and that’s why this project was so fulfilling. We are so proud to work with Food for Education. Find out more about this wonderful organisation battling hunger across Africa and the barriers they’re breaking for children’s education.

Want to chat about your own website or project? Say hello.

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